Here's a Charles Krauthammer piece in the Washington Post submitted for consideration:
[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9033-2001Oct29.html[/url]
[size=4]Not Enough Might[/size=4]
By Charles Krauthammer
Tuesday, October 30, 2001; Page A21
The war is not going well. The Taliban have not yielded ground. Not a single important Taliban leader has been killed, or captured or has defected. On the contrary. The Taliban have captured and executed our great Pashtun hope, Abdul Haq. The Joint Chiefs express surprise at the tenacity of the enemy.
The war is not going well and it is time to say why. It has been fought with half-measures. It has been fought with an eye on the wishes of our "coalition partners." It has been fought to assuage the Arab "street." It has been fought to satisfy the diplomats rather than the generals.
Thirty years ago in Vietnam, we fought a war finely calibrated to win "hearts and minds." Bomb today, pause tomorrow. That strategy met with nothing but pain and defeat. One of the products of that war was Colin Powell. He and his generation vowed that never again would American lives be sacrificed, their missions compromised, their objectives distorted to satisfy purely political objectives.
And yet for three weeks in Afghanistan we held back from massively bombing the Taliban front lines facing the Northern Alliance. Why? [b]Because Pakistan does not like the Northern Alliance[/b]. So we calibrate the war to produce a precise ethnic balance, satisfying our various allies, for a post-Taliban Afghanistan.
But you don't get to post-Taliban until you've defeated the Taliban. And you don't defeat the Taliban with antiseptic attacks on fixed installations and pinpoint raids on front-line positions. You do it by scaring the living hell out of the enemy, producing in him the rational calculation that you're going to win and he'd better change sides.
The president repeatedly emphasizes that this is not a war against civilians. We are expending enormous effort on dropping food. The Pentagon feels obliged to respond to every Taliban claim of civilian casualties -- diverting reconnaissance and other resources to investigate stories that are often fabricated.
- continued -

Why have we turned this into an operation for the liberation of Afghanistan? Afghanistan will be liberated if we succeed. But that is not why we are there. We are there to avenge 5,000 murdered Americans and to protect the rest by killing those preparing to murder again.
That defines our mission: destroying al Qaeda and the Taliban. What comes after will be an interesting problem. But it comes after. [b]To restrain our military now in order to placate the diplomats is a tragic reprise of Vietnam[/b].
The error began in the very naming of the mission. It started out as Infinite Justice. But we could not have that, we were told, because it might offend Muslims, who believe that infinite justice comes only from God. (Don't Christians and Jews believe that too? Were they offended?) So we changed it to Enduring Freedom. Very nice. Too nice. We should have called it [b]Righteous Might[/b], the phrase Franklin Roosevelt used in his Pearl Harbor speech to describe what the enemy would now be facing.
Instead, the enemy today is facing calibration and proportionality. The "Powell Doctrine" once preached overwhelming force to achieve victory. Yet we have held back. Why have we not loosed the B-52s and the B-2s to carpet-bomb Taliban positions? And why are we giving the Taliban sanctuary in their cities? We could drop leaflets giving civilians 48 hours to evacuate, after which the cities become legitimate military targets. We know our enemy is planning more mass murder. Every day of urban safety for them is another day of peril for innocent Americans.
Restraint has already cost a lot. An important element of winning is psychological shock, the key to demoralization, defection and disintegration. We have squandered it. Now that the first wave of American power has come and gone, the Taliban are ever more convinced of American uncertainty and of their own indestructibility.
Our solicitousness knows no bounds. The president urges the children of America to each send a dollar to feed Afghan children. He now urges American schoolchildren to find Muslim pen pals. After the carnage of Sept. 11, should not our Muslim allies be urging their people to seek out American pen pals? We were the ones attacked, by Muslims invoking Islam. Why are we are the ones required to demonstrate religious tolerance?
Nice is nice but this is war. We cannot fight it apologetically -- the very talk of holding our fire during Ramadan is beyond belief -- with one hand tied behind our back.
Half-measures are for wars of choice, wars like Vietnam. In wars of choice, losing is an option. You lose and still survive as a nation. The war on terrorism, like World War II, is a war of necessity. Losing is not an option. Losing is fatal. This is no time for restraint and other niceties. This is a time for righteous might.
Eric The(ThisGuyIsAsRightAsRain!)Hun[>]:)]

If we were a few years into this war, I would say the writer makes a good point. Ever see [i]Flight of the Intruder[/i]? A couple of jet jockeys got tired of waiting and took the war straight to downtown Hanoi. And speaking of Ramadan... remember Tet? We were lulled into a sense of complacency thinking the NVA wouldn't attack during their holidays. We were wrong.
Sodie makes a good point. This ain't going to be a quick and decisive win like Desert Storm. Like they've been telling us all along, this is a different kind of war. Alliances are fragile, to say the least. One wrong move and this thing could blow up in our face. Give it some more time.

Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand...? ~ Ronald Reagan

It's only been a little more than a month. How much time passed from Dec 7th 1941 to D-day?

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The Germans weren't the ones who bombed Pearl Harbor. [;)] The first American landings on Japanese-held territory came on August 7th, 1942 -- eight months after the war began.
History aside, we have to ask ourselves if time is working to our advantage or to the Taliban's. The answer will dictate the speed with which the war should be waged.

Sodie makes a good point. This ain't going to be a quick and decisive win like Desert Storm. Like they've been telling us all along, this is a different kind of war. Alliances are fragile, to say the least. One wrong move and this thing could blow up in our face. Give it some more time.

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Does Saddam know we won Desert Storm? [;)]
This is not a different kind of war. A nation has allowed an organization to exist within their borders that has committed an act of war. This is no different than the nation of Japan allowing the Tojo regime to exist within theirs, circa 1941.
The response to an act of war MUST always be a massive military response that eliminates any possibility of a follow-up strike by the enemy as well as serve as a deterrent to other nations that might seek to attack us.
We will lose this "war" if we focus only on killing the terrorists that were responsible. We must literally destroy an entire nation in order to communicate to the few moderate leaders of other nations that we will never tolerate agrression against our nation, and if they hope to live another day they must stamp out all anti-US terrorist organizations. They are all police states, so this isn't even an effort on their part.
We can't get trapped by the Vietnam/Korean mentality of limited war, and handcuffing our military to please our enemies or our "allies".
Our freedom depends on the total elimination of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Libya.

We need to completely destroy the hometowns of the terrorists no matter where they are. Destruction to the point that only rubble remains and even the rats are dead. Until moslem mammas figure out it's in their own best interest not to let their babies grow up to be terrorists, the cycle will keep repeating itself.

Charles Krauthammer is dead-on. This nation no longer has the collective stones to go all the way, even in the wake of tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in Vietnam. Even when kicking ass we still are pulling punches.
I fear for the national future . . .

Originally Posted By TheCommissioner:
We need to completely destroy the hometowns of the terrorists no matter where they are. Destruction to the point that only rubble remains and even the rats are dead. Until moslem mammas figure out it's in their own best interest not to let their babies grow up to be terrorists, the cycle will keep repeating itself.

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What good would that do? Women have no say in Islamic culture in their reproduction or the rearing of their children.

Originally Posted By Chairborne_Ranger:
Charles Krauthammer is dead-on. This nation no longer has the collective stones to go all the way, even in the wake of tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in Vietnam. Even when kicking ass we still are pulling punches.
I fear for the national future . . .

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Well we aren't stopping for Ramadan, that was a myth. It appears that we have or will have shortly a base in northern Afganistan for special operations raids. Seems to me people are being awfully unreasonable in their expectations. Someone posted above that we landed on Guadalcanal eight months after Pearl Harbor. Well, in 8 months you would have a legitimate case to complain a little.

Originally Posted By ArmdLbrl:
Someone posted above that we landed on Guadalcanal eight months after Pearl Harbor. Well, in 8 months you would have a legitimate case to complain a little.

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It took 8 months because it HAD to take 8 months, if we could have struck back the 8th of December, you know THAT generation would set the entire Eastern Hemisphere on fire if it had the means.
A toast to LeMay, Patton, MacArthur and their unending will to wage total war on behalf of the US.